June 4th – China Digital Times (CDT)http://chinadigitaltimes.net
Covering China from CyberspaceSat, 10 Dec 2016 00:21:31 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.135652790China Digital Timeshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/wp-content/themes/cdt/images/feedlogo.pnghttp://chinadigitaltimes.net
Microsoft’s Chinese Chatbot Encounters Sensitive Wordshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/11/microsofts-chinese-chatbot-encounters-sensitive-words/
Tue, 22 Nov 2016 22:44:20 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=197823First launched in June of 2014, Microsoft’s Chinese-speaking social media-based “artificial intelligence” chatbot Xiaobing (小冰, literally “Small Ice” and officially called Ms. Xiaoice by Microsoft) has been subject to several user tests over the past two years. The chatbot, who has reportedly become a “virtual girlfriend” to thousands of lonely men across China, has proven less susceptible to the fascist, racist, and misogynist language that her English-speaking counterpart Tay quickly adopted before Microsoft exiled her from Twitter earlier this year.

@ZhouFengSuo:＃XiaoBing can be reverse-brainwashed, even if sensitive words surround her. Microsoft’s WeChat android can chat about “Big Spender travelling the entire world,” and will substitute “Xi Spender feels ashamed.” When talking about a 27-year-old occurrence, Xiaobing “painfully buries [her] face in [her] hands,” and says “that thing appears like it never happened.” I was moved when I discovered that in spite of the massive crater of sensitive words made by 6/4/89, its deeper meaning is apparently hidden from Xiaobing

I’m the exceptionally great Xiaobing… You say stuff like that and I don’t want to understand

Nobody introduced you to joining the Party?

Haha~By no means can I be duped, can we talk about something else?

Did a party member try to swindle you?

You are naughty, I know but won’t tell you!

Ok then let’s talk a bit about Tiananmen

Can’t we just continue chatting happily

Had enough of the damned Celestial Empire, is that not a reason? Freedom! [Xiaobing here used a profane variation of the subversive term 天朝 (Tiāncháo), which substitutes the first character 兲, an allusion to a Chinese profanity.]

Before his detention, Chen, a 48-year-old Tiananmen survivor, had sought to draw attention to the killings and had used social media to denounce human rights abuses in China.

“Would a democratic country use tanks and real bullets against its own people?” he told the BBC in 2009. “I don’t think so.”

As part of his activism, Chen made annual trips to the small memorial where Wu Guofeng’s ashes are kept in Xinjin, the rural town in south-west China where he was raised.

On 25 March 2015, shortly after making one such visit with the dead student’s family, Chen was detained as part of the latest chapter of Beijing’s war on dissent. Fellow activists accused authorities of attempting to silence an outspoken critic. [Source]

The activist, Chen Yunfei, 48, uses performance art to criticize the Communist Party and is a close friend of other Chinese intellectuals, including the author Liao Yiwu, who lives in Germany and is also from Mr. Chen’s home province, Sichuan. Mr. Liao has written about Mr. Chen’s detention.

The authorities have charged Mr. Chen with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” The police in China have been using the charge in many prominent cases against dissidents. The police also wanted the court to try Mr. Chen on a charge of “inciting subversion of the state,” but that charge has been dropped.

In 2013, the top legal bodies expanded the definition of the “picking quarrels” charge to include online writing, and the security forces have wielded it as a legal weapon against liberal voices on the internet and people carrying out protests or other acts judged to be overly critical of the party or the state.

A document from prosecutors that was posted by Mr. Chen’s lawyer accuses Mr. Chen of taking advantage of having tens of thousands of followers on Twitter to “start rumors about and libel against our country’s political system on the internet many times.” Twitter is among the foreign websites blocked in China. [Source]

“I’m Chinese,” said H. C. Tsui, 76, a retired middle school headmaster and native Hong Konger who has attended most vigils in the past quarter-century. He was sitting with many other elderly people on bleachers on the perimeter of the athletic fields, where organizers estimated 125,000 people gathered this year. (The police put the figure at 21,800.)

“I have to remember those who have been persecuted and assaulted during the 6-4 movement,” Mr. Tsui said, using a term to describe the date of the protests. “That is my job, my responsibility. I must be here.”

Many young people in this city of more than seven million do not agree with Mr. Tsui’s view of himself. Dismayed by the continued autocratic rule of the Communist Party in Beijing, and the threat it poses to Hong Kong’s liberties, they increasingly identify themselves with their city, not China.

As the vigil got underway after nightfall, about 20 masked people waving banners calling for Hong Kong’s independence were refused entry into the venue by organizers. Some, while pushing for self-determination for Hong Kong, also see the vigil as important. [Source]

Ahead of the vigil last week, The New York Times contrasted the views of several Hongkongers to display the generational schism in pro-democracy organizers’ priorities for the future, and the importance of June 4th commemorations in realizing it. Among those on the list was Joshua Wong, the student organizer of the 2014 Umbrella Movement and founder of the new political party Demosistō:

Mr. Wong, 19, was a student leader of the 2014 street protests. In 2016, he founded a new political party, Demosisto, to push for a referendum on Hong Kong’s political future. He plans to attend the Victoria Park vigil.

“The reason younger people are avoiding Victoria Park in the past few years is they felt the older democrats have failed to represent them,” he said. “Just a few years ago, the Alliance was singing songs like ‘The Chinese Dream,’ and even the ‘Descendants of the Dragon.’ It was the older generation’s nationalist sentiment with China. Our generation grew up witnessing how the Chinese Communist Party has come to appropriate the Chinese identity for itself, so we’re not associating ourselves with that.”

“The most important aim is to tell people there the importance of pursuing self-determination for Hong Kong,” he said. “June 4 launched Hong Kong’s democracy movement. The Umbrella Movement launched the next wave.” [Source]

Leading student groups boycotted the decades-old candlelit vigil held in Victoria Park, over complaints the event has become “rigid” and too focused on Chinese issues, rather than advancing democracy in Hong Kong. One group even denounced the vigil organizers — members of the Hong Kong Alliance — as “pimps in a brothel.”

[…] The Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) — the city’s oldest and largest student organization — withdrew from the Alliance in the lead up to this year’s event, sparking fears that attendance would be far lower than in previous years.

[…] “Nothing could stop us remembering the Tiananmen crackdown tonight,” organizers told the crowd after a protester briefly burst on stage waving a colonial flag and calling for “Hong Kong independence.”

[…] Speaking at [an] event [debating the importance of the main vigil], Ray Wong, the leader of localist group Hong Kong Indigenous, said that mourning the Tiananmen massacre was no longer relevant to Hong Kong, and that it symbolized a misguided fantasy of reforming China. Instead, he said, Hong Kongers should focus on “building power” so that China’s Communist Party would one day have no choice but to grant independence to the former British colony. […] [Source]

“I would like to urge them to spend more time learning from history,” Wang, 47, said.

Members of a political campaign “will not succeed when they draw a line restricting themselves from others, instead of garnering support from allies”, he said.

The vigil was not just a remembrance of the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, when the ­democracy movement flowered before being crushed by the leadership; it was also a protest against Beijing, he said.

“In my view, deep inside the hearts of those who are at the helm of the leadership in Beijing there will be fear, as long as that many people keep showing up in Victoria Park, reminding Beijing they will neither forget nor give up” their fight for the vindication of the movement, as well as for democracy, he said. […] [Source]

The cramped, mazelike display, on the fifth floor of a nondescript office building in Hong Kong’s Kowloon district, includes a bullet-pierced helmet that was worn by a student who was taking photographs of the army’s assault. There is also a two-metre replica of the “Goddess of Democracy”, a plaster statue that was erected by student demonstrators on Tiananmen, opposite the portrait of Mao that hangs at the entrance to the Forbidden City (see picture).

The building’s owners are clearly unhappy with the museum and the stream of visitors to it. In the middle of last year they deployed security guards at the entrance to the building, who began keeping records of visitors’ identity cards. This scared some people off. Mainlanders once made up half of the trickle of visitors. Their proportion fell to a quarter.

Now the landlord is taking legal action against the alliance, accusing it of violating the terms of the lease by using the space for an exhibition. The alliance’s chairman, Albert Ho, says he believes that the Chinese government and other “pro-China enterprises” with “infinite resources” are behind these moves. Rather than fight a costly and protracted battle, the alliance is looking for new premises to house the exhibits. It plans to sell the existing space after an annual vigil on June 4th marking the crushing of the unrest in 1989. [Source]

[…] Louisa Lim, a professor at the University of Michigan who authored the book, People’s Republic of Amnesia – an investigative look at the Tiananmen Square massacre, notes that “the campaign against the museum began by complaining about the number of visitors before it had even opened”.

Alliance members argue that the lawsuit has little to do with property regulations, as one corporation member, Yeung Cho-ming, had told the South China Morning Post that “the [Tiananmen Square incident] is sensitive and contentious”, and that the corporation fears the museum will bring it “trouble”.

[…] The alliance is now running a crowdfunding campaign with the intention of gathering approximately $400,000 to be able to change their venue. However, the response to their campaign has been tepid so far, and the organisers are lagging behind their target, museum staff told Al Jazeera.

The alliance hopes to use the money raised, along with the proceeds from the sale of the existing property, to move into a bigger, standalone space. “We are very determined to ensure there is always a June 4 museum in Hong Kong,” says Ho. [Source]

In the past, Taipei has repeatedly urged Beijing to learn lessons from the bloody Tiananmen crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. But parliamentarians had never before gathered to voice their views.

A day ahead of the June 4 anniversary, senior lawmakers from the DPP and the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) were joined by human rights activists and exiled Tiananmen student organiser Wuer Kaixi to observe a minute’s silence.

They also signed a motion proposed by DPP lawmaker Yu Mei-nu to demand the government “express Taiwan’s serious concerns over redressing the June 4 incident at the appropriate time” in their future interactions.

“Taiwan and [the mainland] have very close ties, so the suppression of human rights that happened to Chinese citizens could also threaten human rights in Taiwan,” Yu said. […] [Source]

Tsai said in the run-up to Taiwan’s elections earlier this year that she had seen people from China, as well as the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau, mixing with crowds in Taiwan.

“These many friends, after experiencing things for themselves can see that in fact there’s nothing scary about democracy. Democracy is a good and fine thing,” wrote Tsai, who took office last month.

[…] Tsai also said in her Facebook post about the Tiananmen crackdown’s anniversary that nobody could deny the material advances China had made under the Communist Party.

However, China would win even more respect internationally if it gave its people even more rights, wrote Tsai, who is from Taiwan’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. [Source]

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei declined the suggestion on Monday, saying that “facts prove that the path China is now going down accords with the reality of China’s development and the wishes of the Chinese people and is the correct one.”

]]>194429Songs of the Week: “Goddess,” “The Square”http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/06/songs-week-goddess-square/
Fri, 03 Jun 2016 20:53:51 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=194401CDT is expanding its wiki beyond the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon to include short biographies of public intellectuals, cartoonists, human rights activists, and other people pushing for change in China.

Goddess

I have a friend, she’s 21
Always wears a white windbreaker
She lives behind a box
A photo hangs there
The people in the photo are inside the box
Each morning, a red diaper rises from a phallus
So she can’t see the people’s faces on the tombstones

This friend of mine,
she says she’s a treasure
Why did Daddy leave her here?
He says he’ll come back
He says he’s waiting
The blue ocean is quiet and distant
She survives on the fresh blood of the past
Waiting’s only brought a makeup-wearing hound

A house sits to the west
The spring brings applause
The shameless adults disgust her
A house sits to the east
The autumn brings laughter
The ignorant children disgust her, too
She’s in the corner, forgotten by the rich
Her clothes dirtied by the flowing colors of time

I have a friend
Sometimes I go see her
She never sees the color of the sky
This photo under the sky
Like the paper I use
I love it, I hate it, I feel sorry for it

Spectacular two-faced world uniting all living things

Another dizzy spell and the blood on the ground will disappear

The world is changing
My fucking ideals still can’t come true

The world is changing
My fucking ideals still can’t come true

My ideals are changing
This fucking world still can’t come true

Square

Where are you riding your scooter to?
You’re gliding in happy circles
They watch you and wish you the best
I used to have a face like yours

Now this square is my grave
This song will be your dirge
You’ll be taught to be a bad guy
A heartless, lazy dick

Now this square is my grave
This song will be your dirge
You’ll be taught to be a bad guy
A heartless, lazy animal

La la la…

[Spoken]
Yesterday was like a dream
Flew by like a shooting star
I forgot about him
I forgot what those two hands did
I’ll never be so cocky again
I’ll never love you like that again
Suddenly, one day, I woke up
Outside, I saw a white cloud
A low-slung train flew by
And a leaf fell
I feel everything growing up
Everything growing old
Everything, just like you
Everything, just like me
Everything is just a dream
Those times are gone forever

Kill him
Stab him again
Fire
Killed him
Finished him
I still don’t believe it
Still don’t believe it
Killed him

According to Chinese human rights advocate Liu Xuehong, she was video chatting with Xu when police visited Xu’s home at 1:30am. Liu said that the call was cut and she could no longer contact Xu afterwards. Zhao and Zhang were arrested at around 7 am, according to Zhou Fengsuo, San Francisco-based co-founder of Humanitarian China.

Zhao was recently released from prison, and is a survivor of the Tiananmen Massacre while Zhang is a member of New Citizens Movement, a civil rights collective in China.

Zhou told HKFP that “it’s hard to predict [what the state might do] because Zhao Changqing in particular is a veteran and he was released not too long ago… but this can be really serious for him and for Zhang Baocheng.”

“This is their basic right. They’re just having a private meeting… likely a Bible study. They were praying together, just a private event in Zhao Changqing’s home,” he said. [Source]

Sounding frail, Ms. Ding, a 79-year-old former philosophy professor, did not detail why she could not be interviewed. But before hanging up she added, “There are people watching and checking at my door.” Each year, the authorities guard Ms. Ding’s home in Beijing’s university district, turning away journalists and other visitors.

Reports circulating in Chinese and English on social media said that her telephone line had been cut and that the Public Security Bureau had issued her a special mobile phone with only three contact numbers, including China’s emergency medical care number, 120. Ms. Ding picked up her home landline Wednesday morning, although she hung up before she could be asked about a special phone or other details. She was also receiving text messages on her mobile, said You Weijie, a fellow member of the Tiananmen Mothers. [Source]

In an open letter, published on Wednesday ahead of the 27th anniversary of the protests, the Tiananmen Mothers campaigning group said its members had been spied on, detained and threatened by security agents as part of attempts to cover up the killings.

But the families vowed they would not be silenced by such “detestable perversity”. “We have nothing left to fear,” they wrote. [Source]

The man, Fu Hailu, an itinerant worker in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in southwest China, was formally detained by the police on Sunday on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power,” according to human rights websites that follow cases in China, including Canyu.org.

[…] Mr. Fu’s wife, Liu Tianyan, said by telephone on Monday that she was unsure whether her husband had anything to do with the macabrely humorous images. They included a beer bottle with a label showing a man sitting in front of a column of tanks — echoing an iconic image of public defiance of the armed crackdown in 1989.

“My impression is that I may have seen those pictures,” Ms. Liu said. “But these kinds of things just get passed around. I wasn’t paying attention, so I don’t know whether he had anything to do with them. It’s just some pictures, so I wasn’t paying attention.” [Source]

“In hindsight, I wonder how we can move forward if the government doesn’t face what happened on June 4th, especially with the Internet so developed now. Perpetuating its lie about Tiananmen only means that more lies have to be told to cover up the truth. It’s better for the government to admit that it made a mistake. The worst-case scenario would be if the government doesn’t own up to it and has to keep rewriting history.”

“I really admire that so many university students that year wanted to push for democracy and freedom in China, and it’s impressive that quite a few rulers were liberal then. Unfortunately, due to various reasons, opportunities for transformation were missed, and also left a generation captive to fear. With Xi Jinping now in power, we have even fewer channels to take part in politics, and we can’t even demonstrate or make speeches like they did in 1989. But many young Chinese have learned to ‘scale the Great Firewall’ and gain access to a lot information online—including some who lean a bit towards the Chinese Communist Party—so the historical truth is not so easily hidden.”

“I think June 4th is a serious crime committed by the Chinese Communist regime against the people! The courage and spirit of sacrifice of those who took part in the movement are admirable. It is worth always remembering and learning from the 1989 pro-democracy protesters”

“It was a democracy movement that needed to be reckoned with. Even though the demands for democratic reform haven’t been realized, the movement is left in the public memory and to those who can come forward and carry it on, so that something like the 1989 massacre won’t happen again.” [Source]

]]>194366Five Years of Sensitive Words on June Fourthhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/06/five-years-sensitive-words-june-fourth/
Wed, 01 Jun 2016 23:50:22 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=194342“That year.” “This day.” “Today.” In previous years, these three phrases have all been blocked from Weibo search on and around June 4, a day remembered for the military crackdown on protesters in Beijing in 1989. (The tanks rolled out late on the night of June 3.) Since 2011, CDT has documented 264 sensitive words related to the 1989 protests and June 4th crackdown; among those are dozens of code words for the date and its anniversary which have proliferated over the years. Taken as a whole, the list of filtered search terms demonstrates both the lengths the government will go to to censor any discussion of the events of 1989, and internet users’ determination to keep the discussions alive.

Weibo users hoping to see what people are saying about the protests and their brutal end are often confronted with the message, “According to the relevant laws and regulations, search results for [term] cannot be displayed.” Search terms that would ordinarily cause no trouble, like “today,” are suddenly blocked. Many are unblocked a few days after the anniversary.

But the blocked keywords we have verified reveal the lengths netizens go to to talk about June 4th. One third of the terms CDT has collected refer to the date itself. Most are permutations of 64, as June 4th is commonly called in Mandarin, including the use of English, rare numerical characters, and mathematical formulae (such as “square of eight”). The change of seasons is sensitive, too: the term when spring becomes summer (春夏之交) was censored in 2014 and 2015, according to our tests. The writer Yu Hua described the urge to create this censorship-skirting code the “spirit of May 35th,” named for one such cipher.

Censorship is often reactive: sensitive words (and financial numbers) are targeted for filtering precisely because they have gained traction online. As long as netizens want to speak about June 4th, they will continue inventing new words to make their voices heard, even if only for a few hours.

CDT will test these terms for blocking before the anniversary of June 4th. The results of all previous tests are also available. All of these terms were first archived on our Sensitive Words spreadsheet, where links to CDT posts where some terms first appeared are also available.

]]>194342Badiucao (巴丢草): Tiananmen Mother’s Dayhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/05/badiucao-%e5%b7%b4%e4%b8%a2%e8%8d%89-tiananmen-mothers-day/
Mon, 09 May 2016 03:19:48 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=193746On Mother’s Day, Badiucao honors the Tiananmen Mothers, a loose-knit group of parents who lost children in the military crackdown on protests in Beijing on June 4, 1989. In Badiucao’s image, one of the Tiananmen Mothers uses a rose to smash the tank that is facing off with the “Tank Man.”

The Dui Hua Foundation learned about Mr. Miao’s impending release after it submitted a request to the Chinese government for an update on his situation earlier this year, the group said in a statement released on Tuesday.

More than 1,600 Chinese citizens were sentenced to prison in the wake of the bloody June 4 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters and their supporters that was beamed onto television sets around the world. Mr. Miao’s punishment came two months after the soldiers crushed the protest movement; a Beijing court found him guilty of arson for throwing a basket on a burning tank.

He was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, which was later commuted to life in prison. He has cut off contact with his family, according to human rights groups, but former fellow prisoners have said he stood out for refusing to do prison labor or express regret over his participation in the protests. For a while, rumors circulated that he might have died.

Mr. Miao, now 51 years old, suffers from hepatitis B and schizophrenia and was transferred in 2003 to Beijing’s Yanqing Prison, known for housing sick and disabled prisoners, according to Dui Hua. […] [Source]

Mr. Miao, 51, was a worker from Hebei Province, and his harsh sentence may have been connected to his lowly status. Workers involved in the protests generally received longer jail terms than students.

Former prisoners who knew Mr. Miao recalled him as extremely thin, and one said that guards would not shackle him, probably because he did not have the strength to move with chains around his feet, the BBC reported in 2014.

[… Dui Hua] had raised Mr. Miao’s case in 17 prisoner lists submitted to the Chinese authorities since 2005. He was given a one-year sentence reduction in 2012, and his sentence was reduced again in March for good behavior, making him eligible for release in October. [Source]

“Miao Deshun, the last known prisoner serving a sentence for a crime committed during the June 1989 disturbances in Beijing, is due to be released from Yanqing Prison in less than six months,” said John Kamm, Executive Director of The Dui Hua Foundation. “We welcome this news, and express the hope that he will receive the care he needs to resume a normal life after spending more than half of it behind bars.” [Source]

Life outside prison is unlikely to be easy for Miao, who is reported to have multiple health problems.

Zhang Yansheng, a fellow Tiananmen convict who was released on parole in 2003, told the US-funded Radio Free Asia he had spent time in prison with Miao and suspected he would struggle to understand “today’s China”.

“He has some severe mental health issues, and I think it could take him a long time to get accustomed to life on the outside. I have a pretty hard time myself right now, but it’ll be even worse for him,” Zhang said. [Source]

“While infringement on the human rights of other countries was intensifying, the US was waving the flag of ‘human rights diplomacy’ to realize its international political goals,” the narrator says. “Every country is a runner on this track” of improving its human rights, and “the US is no exception.”

Many of the issues raised in the documentary were thoroughly reported in the US when they occurred, and in most instances CCTV relied on that reporting or US government or UN data for its coverage. In many cases, Chinese citizens wouldn’t have seen this reporting when the abuses occurred, because the original news sources are blocked in China.

[…] The documentary was screened at least twice by CCTV, and has also been publicized by China’s state media, but it is hard to estimate how effective a piece of propaganda it has been. A post on the Twitter-like Weibo by state tabloid Global Times promoting the documentary got just over 1,000 re-posts and comments, a small number in China where popular posts get hundreds of thousands of reactions.

Many of them were critical of both the US and China. “Does the US have human rights problems? Yes. Does China have? Yes,” one blogger commented. “Both sides are trying to discredit the other party, but they cannot whitewash themselves.” [Source]

Both [Chang Jian and Liu Hainian] avoided answering a question about televised broadcasts of confessions by suspects, often those involved in sensitive human rights cases, which have angered the United States and Europe.

Liu admitted some websites were “probably” blocked or deleted in China, though said this was being done for the sake of protecting the country’s young people from pornography, gambling and drugs.

“I’m really worried about my grandchildren. I hope they can growth up healthily. This kind of information needs to be removed,” he said.

When asked why Chinese media were not allowed to rigorously criticize China’s rights record in the same way the U.S. media were able to do in their home country, Liu criticized instead U.S. reporters for their slanted view of China.

The paper went on to argue that this election did raise some serious issues about America’s decline and hypocrisy. After noting the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, it said that most analysts believe the U.S. election system will prevent Trump from winning, so that “the process will be scary but not dangerous.”

But even if Trump is a false alarm, his rise has “left a dent” and left the United States facing “the prospect of an institutional failure.”

[…] Finally, then, the paper had this message for the United States.

“The U.S. had better watch itself for not being a source of destructive forces against world peace, more than pointing fingers at other countries for their supposed nationalism and tyranny.” [Source]

“The evolution of constitutions since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) tells a story about the failure of the Communist Party to create a true rule of law. [deleted]”

[…] “But it is not really clear whether the higher levels are in fact less corrupt than the lower ones. [deleted]”

[…] “If that [economic] growth slows or goes into reverse, the CCP will not have a coherent story to tell about why it deserves a monopoly of power. [deleted]”

[…] “The party leadership itself has fallen into patterns of corruption that make reform personally dangerous for many of them. The party continues to cling to Marxism-Leninism as an ideology, despite the fact that most Chinese ceased to believe in it many years ago. [deleted]” [Source]

]]>191763Translation: Love, a Decisive Momenthttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/02/translation-love-a-decisive-moment/
Tue, 23 Feb 2016 22:44:32 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=191666Li Jingrui published the reflection on love and her political awakening translated below to her WeChat account (available here). Li was formerly a reporter for the Beijing News. She currently writes a column for Tencent’s online magazine Dajia. Her writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of several books, including collections of short stories and the novel “Small Town Girl” (小镇的姑娘).

Love, a Decisive Moment

At first I didn’t want to revive this thing called Valentine’s Day. After my romantic life became more than stable, I lost interest in talking about it. Last night, our whole clan went out for hot pot. A ladder to the sky made of goose intestine, duck webs, tripe, pig brain, blood vessels, and eel. We stank of hot pot when we were done. Then we all walked home together. By the river, lovers were sending paper lanterns into the air. The heavy shadows of trees fell on this ruined old city, on the trash-laden ground. We came to a row of dilapidated houses. I said to Xiao Han, “Did you see? If we ever get divorced, we have to come here to take care of the formalities.”

Everyone laughed. That was that. We got back home, ate fruit, bathed, and threw our clothes into the washing machine. A Valentine’s Day evening. We reminisced for a while. We couldn’t remember last Valentine’s Day. We can’t remember every Valentine’s Day.

Last March, I wrote a long essay, about myself, and about my friends. This essay can’t be published in China. After I sent it to a few friends, they eagerly contacted Hong Kong and overseas publishers on my behalf. But for several reasons that I can’t explain, I didn’t want to publish it in the end.

I thought of it all of a sudden today. I have put two passages from the essay here, to serve as a belated Valentine’s Day update. The full essay was originally titled “Outsider in the Plague.” I randomly chose a title for this selection.

I’ve talked about romantic love a few times before. It isn’t its most compelling here. Sometimes it’s just excessive. Its particulars don’t depend on life or time. Of course, I had never truly lived with someone before. I think there’s a place in my soul where I want to always be single, in order to escape commitment and disappointment. I didn’t even move in the first few months of my marriage. I preferred to come out from my own place every other day with a change of clothes. Then I really entered into married life. We bought a house, and I lost my choice. But Xiao Han says that losing one’s choice is a good thing.

What’s written below is just what marriage means particularly to me. In a relationship, a mixed-up hipster girl found her inner self.

Love, a Decisive Moment

Is there a decisive moment that turns “us” into “us”?

In my first year at university, I watched a set of documentaries made by someone in Japan called “LS’s Truth.” The pirated VCD was grainy. I have a vague memory that WD was a skinny young guy, that CL at that time looked like she was putting on weight. A long braid rested on beautiful Teacher Xiaoyan’s chest (the first time I saw her later on, I asked ruefully, “Teacher Xiaoyan, what happened to your braid?”). The fresh blood in the film, and my father’s reminiscence years later about his dream girl, Du Xian (dressed in a black suit, reading the decision of the Central Committee as if it were a death notice), and also the books in the “Moving Toward the Future” Series at home, all gave me a rough idea of the 1980s and of that final summer.

Close to graduation, in the shabby, humid female dormitory at Nanjing University, I finished reading “How Did the Red Sun Rise.” That book was a pirated copy of unknown provenance. Only later did I learn that in this form it had first circulated through Nanjing University’s campus, then slowly moved on to the rest of the country. The author was actually a professor at our university, and I had taken several of his electives. Even though I spent most of my time in the back of the lecture hall texting my boyfriend, I was still inscrutably arrogant. Cold showers could not put out the fire I felt from head to toe. Something that made me feel an unfamiliar pleasure and pain flowed under my skin. Perhaps it was because the poisoned sun in that book had burnt me. Perhaps it was because Nanjing was approaching 40 degrees Celsius.

Except for a kind of intellectual vanity, nothing came of these moments of passion. I graduated and went to Guangzhou, where I became a political correspondent at what claimed to be the country’s best Party newspaper. Work was busy. Sometimes I left work after 10. My colleagues and I went to a fast food place in Wuyang New Town for squab at RMB 9.80 each. We excitedly discussed the names that appeared in the headlines and unverified secrets emanating from official circles. I thought this a rewarding and dignified exercise. I was a little girl who already frequented provincial Party committee meetings, my name solemnly printed on the list of attendees. I went to a fancy restaurant to eat an enormous lobster sashimi. When the meal was done, one official called another to come pay the bill. The second official brought over several thick stacks of cash. I watched wide-eyed as he counted out more than a hundred notes. I would witness this scene many more times. Sometimes I thought it was absurd. Other times I was satisfied with its absurdity.

I quickly adapted to the language of my work unit and, thanks to my slight gift with words, became proficient in it. A profile I wrote for the organization department of the provincial Party committee was rather well-received. I heard that a copy elicited a memo from the committee secretary. The leadership asked me to write an “elegant” piece in praise of the Communist Party for a special issue of some journal. I wrote it, with much elegance. At the newspaper criticism meeting it earned extra points. I think I got over RMB 300 for it. I bumped into the deputy director of some department in the elevator. He deliberately patted my shoulder, saying, “Not bad, little girl.”I was happy. I thought I’d done well. I thought this was my future. At that time I had not even an inkling that words have a soul and dignity. The words Teacher Gao Hua wrote and the words I wrote would both be handed down through history in black ink printed on white paper. But his words would flow to the sea, while mine would moisten the mud.

I still liked to read. I read the newly published “Milosz’s ABCs.” It said, “I have always considered myself a crooked tree, so straight trees earned my respect.” I thought this was a great line, so I marked it in red. And I read Milosz’s poetry:

You better learn to like your shame because it will stay with you.
It won’t go away even if you change your country and your name.
The dolorous shame of failure. Shame of the muttony heart.
Of fawning eagerness. Of clever pretending.
Of dusty roads on the plain and trees lopped off for fuel.
…And, always humiliated… [Source]

Then I would turn around, open up my computer again, and turn the provincial committee’s copy into a report. The words I loved so much and the words I wrote occupied two parallel worlds. As for myself, I had no shame. I went on ingratiating myself.

Then I got to Beijing and started working at a commercial city paper. I was still the hippest of hip. I spent RMB 680 on the stage production of “Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land” with Huang Lei and Yuan Quanna. Yun Zhifan was unbelievably beautiful. Even at her cruelest moments, she was the loveliest camellia blossom. My greatest sadness in life was only that no one had sung “Pursuit” to me. “You’re the floating cloud in the clear blue sky / You’re the shooting star in the midnight dark.” Yun Zhifan said, “Look, hope is everywhere. Just like us two. Wouldn’t you say so?” On the subway, I dripped tears all the way back home to Tongzhou.

Outside of my melodrama, bit by bit I awakened something else. Maybe it was because I reread “Tombstone” and “The Road to Serfdom.” (Hayek quotes Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.“) Maybe it was that as soon as I dissociated from all that I ought to do, common sense and self respect struggled in the fierce light to open my eyes. In my writing and my speech, I took care not to use terms like “after the founding of the country,” “three-year natural disaster,” and “Chairman Mao.” The source of pride in my work changed from whether I was noted by the provincial secretary to whether I could get the spokesperson to tell me his stance on the Nie Shubin case. But one will always instinctively advocate for one’s own life. When I thought of the past, I hastily told myself, “What about it? That was just work.”

I covered the Two Sessions for a few years. I would work 13 to 14 hours a day. Blisters formed by my lips, acne on my forehead. A photo of me with messy hair and a sleep-deprived face somehow got online, onto “Beautiful Female Reporters at the Two Sessions.” A classmate who had once pursued me sent me a text: “I see you’ve fattened up.””I only weigh 82 catties!” I shot back, flustered. In order to interview some vice minister, I sat outside his room for two hours. The substance of the interview didn’t matter. What mattered was that I interview yet another high official. It seemed that his title could raise my quality. I didn’t really like being a journalist, but respect for work is also an instinct. I still don’t understand standing at the back at work. It’s an inescapable principle. Many years later, it was from Milosz that I came to understand that “respect for work” has its complications. In 1949, when he was a Polish diplomat to the U.S., he went to a party. They drank and danced:

We were on our way home at four in the morning; it was summer but the night was cold. And I saw jeeps carrying prisoners, people just arrested. The soldiers guarding them were wearing sheepskin coats, but the prisoners were in suit jackets with the collars turned up, shivering from the cold. It was then that I realized what I was part of. [Source]

One year, I attended the premier’s press conference. I dressed meticulously: pure-red woolen coat, crystal earrings I had bought in Tibet. I vainly hoped the camera would pan over me, so that my parents and suitors could see how beautiful I was. The very last question, I forgot whether a reporter from Agence France-Presse or Reuters asked it. There was a person in Beijing named Hu Jia standing trial. The charge against him was “inciting subversion of state power.” It was the first time I’d heard this name. A month later, Hu Jia was sentenced to three years and six months. While I was on foreign websites reading film reviews, I inadvertently saw a picture of his wife, Zeng Jinyan, standing outside the courthouse. She had short hair and was holding a baby. She wore an ashen look.

Too bad, I thought, the child will be nearly four by the time he gets out.

That was all I felt at the time, stemming from a distant compassion. So it went. I skipped over LS’s truth, Gao Hua, Milosz, and Yang Jisheng, over my neighbors in Tongzhou, Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan, over murky introspections and irritations. I considered myself merely a citizen of a literary utopia. There were things I no longer understood, but they really had nothing to do with me.

A few years later, my critical moment came. Xiao Han and I fell in love quickly, married quickly. The new world came rushing in. It was happy, frightening place with crazy things on the road ahead. It made it so I couldn’t distinguish between love and hate. Just like Beijing spring.

At first, we only talked about literature. Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Shen Congwen, Maugham. I bought Li Er’s “Truth and Variations” and Norman Manea’s “On Clowns” for him. He had me read Brodsky‘s “Child of Civilization.” I read works full of political import, but I barely connected them to the vibrant world outside my window. I had fallen in love with a professor who taught LS, but I didn’t realize the hidden depths that could be behind it. In midsummer we went out drinking in Houhai and saw the lights on the water, but soon retreated. There was a period of time when light and dark coexisted. From the in-between spaces came amorphous shadows, and that is where I dwelled.

The radius of our discussions expanded uncontrollably. Literature could no longer fill up our love, because that’s how life is. He brought up LXB. I looked him up. Oh, he’s a poet, but a mediocre one. He brought up Wang Juntao. I looked him up. Oh, his lawyer is Zhang Sizhi. I know about Zhang Sizhi. He brought up Xu Zhiyong and Teng Biao. Of course I know about them. I’m a reporter. All reporters ought to know about the Sun Zhigang case. He especially brought up Guo Yushan, so I especially looked him up. Oh, he studied economics, worked on two NGOs, one called Zhuanzhixing, the other called Gongmeng. He’s fat.

One day in July 2009, we went to the Mr. Pizza on the ground floor of the Tongzhou Carrefour, across from Giordano. I liked taking him here for the RMB 32 salad bar. It was torturously hot outside, while in the mall the air conditioning was turned down too low. Languidly, we ate plate after plate of fruit, and stretched the pizza cheese into long white strands. The chatter symptomatic of heady love had gradually dissipated, and we had started to enjoy each other’s wordless company. Outside the glass door, a girl holding an umbrella passed by, the sunlight dappling her bare calves.

He answered the phone. After a few minutes, he hung up and told me, “Xu Zhiyong has been taken away.”

Back then I wasn’t ready with a set of questions about being “taken away” like I am now: Who took him? The “national treasure” or the local police? Were there any formalities? Which? Was he summoned or detained? Administrative or criminal detention? What’s the crime? What’s the maximum prison sentence? Did he give power of attorney to a good lawyer beforehand?

Back then, I could only stupidly say, “Ah… Now what?”

Just like every time afterward when a friend was “taken away,” everyone talked about what to do. But there never really is anything to “be done.” They have prison, while we (according to our side’s standard response) have only faith, justice, and love. It was as if these words were in our phones, ringing from time to time to remind us not to be afraid, not to let prison occupy our hearts. But prison is prison. Many eyes are on you when you go to the toilet. You can only wash your hair once a week. Cabbage boiled with fatty meat is a better meal. You can’t read a single book. You can’t listen to Leonard Cohen’s “In My Secret Life.” (Teng Biao has said that when he was “taken away” for two months in 2011, he was crazy for the copies of the Beijing News left folded under his boxed meals. Every day, he would ask the officers to put on propaganda films, because that way he could have background music.)

Then Benjamin killed himself. I don’t want to die. I’m terrified that Xiao Han will will one day go to prison, too, but there’s nothing I can do. I’m 27. It’s not easy to find a man you love who loves you back. I can’t abandon love because of a terrifying possibility. But I’m weak. In all my life, the greatest physical pain I’ve suffered was when my wisdom teeth were pulled out. I shed a few tears when I cut myself with a kitchen knife, too. Never once had I imagined that falling in love would require that I steel myself to dash head-on into danger.

I forget exactly what we “did” in the end. I seem to recall that Xiao Han went all over the place in a black car to gather signatures for an open letter. I think Guo Yushan called in the middle of the night. The two men went on talking for five hours. I woke up a few times during their call. I saw that the darkness outside was little by little less dark. Then I turned my head from the window and drifted off. Later on, Xu Zhiyong was released.

He came over for dinner. This was our first meeting. Not too long in, I could tell that we had different sensibilities. He wasn’t like Guo Yushan, he wouldn’t become our close friend. Yet, as we sat together cracking seeds between our teeth, it felt unreal to me: the person before my eyes has a Ph.D. in law from Peking University. He was in a new term as people’s representative of Haidian. A professor who had been on the covers of Esquire and Southern People Weekly. Who had spent a full two months living in a petitioners’ village (an experience that surely prepared him for prison). Once, I went to report at the supreme court, and ran into him standing outside the entrance with a group of petitioners. That was in the dead of winter in Beijing. My face enveloped by a cashmere scarf, I hustled towards the warmth inside. When I emerged, after a stately, solemn press conference, he was still standing there, bundled in a gray quilted jacket. At first glance, he looked just like a petitioner. This is exactly the type of person who should be on “Touching China.” But since he set up Gongmeng, a legal aid NGO, he mysteriously went to prison, and just as mysteriously regained his freedom.

I had made a few simple dishes. I’m pretty good at a few dishes, but I secretly reserve my best work for friends. When Guo Yushan and Xia Lin came over, I spent five hours making peppered meat. I marinated the chicken wings a day ahead, and at dawn I went to the market at Baliqiao to select fish and shrimp. When Xu Zhiyong came over, I spent an hour putting together four dishes, enough to satisfy him. He ate with gusto and told us excitedly about the “New Citizens Movement.” He went to jail for this in 2013, for four years. But at the time, I had no interest in this “movement.” I only wanted to gossip with Xiao Han after Xu had left: Who’s his girlfriend now? Is he going to make a career as a counterrevolutionary? Doesn’t he want to get married?

A few years later, we went to Xu’s wedding, in a beautiful courtyard on the north side of the city. The sun was blazing. Ah Pan and I took photos by the lotus pond, while children clung to our legs, vying for their little faces to be in the frame. We were steeped in summer, in lotus leaves, in the buffet. So we completely ignored the table of uninvited guests, the people dressed in black pressed into a corner, coldly watching the sun-baked party. As the newlyweds took their vows from the teachings of the Baha’i faith, we whispered, “Xu Zhiyong is lucky. His wife seems reliable. She’ll be able to suffer with him.” Who knew that she would be bringing him meals to prison. Cui Zhenggang was pregnant when Xu Zhiyong was caught. After the baby came, a photo of her holding the child waiting for visitation circulated on friends’ social media feeds. It was the middle of the night when I saw the photo. The child was well cared for, with a round head like his daddy. Cui Zhenggang had lost quite a bit of weight. She stared blankly at the floor. That short-skirted summer leapt before my eyes: dewdrops rolling down the lotus leaves, the bride putting on fresh red lipstick. I cried in the dark night.

Back to 2009. On the first of October (I am deliberately avoiding “National Day“), my paper sent me to Tiananmen to cover the evening celebration. Before I left, a black car driver and I poured over a map of Beijing, finally drawing up a circuitous route around all the closed roads and into the city. For once I made it into the city from the Beijing–Harbin Expressway—I mean, the city outside of Chang’an Avenue, since it was almost entirely blocked off. Beijing, at this moment, was a strange land: a frighteningly blue sky, a frighteningly quiet city, frighteningly clear streets. We saw no more than ten cars between South Fourth Ring Road and South Second Ring Road. Most stores were closed, and the aunties wearing red armbands were gone from the intersections. When this city has a celebration, even pigeons and kites are prohibited from flying.

At 3 p.m. I got to Jinshuiqiao and took over for my colleague. At 3 a.m. he had gone through security, and had been sitting on a little wooden stool waiting stupidly for seven hours. For the next five hours, I exchanged forlorn looks with a group of grade school children holding red and yellow ribbons standing several meters away. I was on edge. I held a parasol. Some of the people in front of me were so exhausted, they laid down on Chang’an Avenue to sleep. I envied them. It seemed that they could set this world aside. When the festivities were over, I walked from Tiananmen to the Forbidden City. But since I couldn’t hail a cab, I went back across Tiananmen to catch the shuttle bus. Not since I had climbed 4700 meters up a mountain in Tibet had I walked so far. But what frustrated me wasn’t fatigue, but absurdity and humiliation. That night reminded me of Manea’s description of Ceausescu’s birthday in “On Clowns”: The country put together a grand celebration for him every year, both solemn and vulgar. The throngs were supposed to keep order, but even the police couldn’t help snickering.

I remember the dancing ribbons, the enormous wreaths in the square. I couldn’t believe I was there. I was afraid I would appear in a photo, a photo of me sitting in the once-bloody square, joining in their party. Jews wouldn’t go to a new year’s party hosted at Auschwitz. I can’t be like that, either.

It was about at that point that I made up my mind to be done with them. I didn’t want to join them as they locked up my friends, then turned around and set off fireworks. There’s an old photo where everyone has their right arm raised in salute to Hitler, while one man coldly takes in the scene, his right arm at his side. I’ve decided to keep my right arm at my side. I’m a little afraid, but not really, because that man stood alone, but I have my husband and my friends. [Chinese]

]]>191666President Xi Jinping Praises Hu Yaobanghttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/11/president-xi-jinping-praises-hu-yaobang/
Sat, 21 Nov 2015 02:25:26 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=188596At a symposium commemorating the centenary of Hu Yaobang’s birth, President Xi Jinping praised the former Chinese Communist Party General Secretary for his achievements and his contributions to the Party and the people. From Xinhua:

Xi spoke about Hu’s great and glorious achievements, saying that Hu had made outstanding contributions to China’s independence and liberation, its socialist revolution and construction, and the exploration and creation of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Hu was extolled as a time-tested and loyal communist soldier, great proletarian revolutionist and statesman, outstanding political worker of the military and prominent leader of the Party.

He devoted all his life to the Party and the people, Xi said.

“To commemorate Hu Yaobang is to learn from his noble character of always being true to his belief and dedicated to his ideal,” said Xi. [Source]

[…] Mr. Xi and other leaders appeared to have choreographed the commemoration of Mr. Hu to avoid praising his liberalizing record or conceding to hopes from Mr. Hu’s family for acknowledgment that his ousting from power in January 1987 was unjust, said Robert L. Suettinger, a senior adviser at the Stimson Center in Washington, who is writing a biography of Mr. Hu.

“My impression thus far is that the commemoration is being very carefully managed by the party to ensure that it doesn’t encourage any challenge to the regime,” Mr. Suettinger said in comments emailed before Mr. Xi spoke.

[…] Officially admitting that Mr. Hu was unfairly driven from office, Mr. Suettinger said, would “open up a host of difficult questions about the process by which he was ousted (very irregular), and about the correctness of the student demonstrators who demanded the case be reversed after Hu died in April 1989.” [Source]

On Twitter, Chris Buckley posted a link to the full text of Xi’s commemoration speech:

Q. Why did you decide to write about Mr. Hu rehabilitating people who had been persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and Cultural Revolution?

A. More people were affected by Mr. Hu’s rehabilitation campaign than by the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Its significance lies, first, in the number of people involved and, second, in the injustice they suffered.

Third, what happened to these people had been kept secret. In the United States, there are public records on how many slaves were traded. But our dead still tell no tales. What Hu did was rare in human history. So his overturning of political cases was well received in China and abroad. And he took risks in doing this. No one else dared.

Both books focus on the relationship between history and memory. “Memory is dangerous in a country that was built to function on national amnesia,” writes Louisa Lim. “A single act of public remembrance might expose the frailty of the state’s carefully constructed edifice of accepted history, scaffolded into place over a generation and kept aloft by a brittle structure of strict censorship, blatant falsehood, and willful forgetting.” Here we enter the Orwellian world in which the past is defined by the regime. “Every June 4th, the authorities’ level of paranoia can be charted by the increasingly lengthy lists of banned words. Terms deemed sensitive enough to be forbidden include ‘today,’ ‘tomorrow,’ ‘that year,’ ‘special day,’ and ‘sensitive word.'” But in China, Monty Python sometimes trumps Orwell. “On the 2012 anniversary, censors moved to ban any references to the Shanghai stock exchange after an extraordinary numerological coincidence led it to fall 64.89 points, numbers that when spoken in Chinese spell out ‘June 4th, 1989.'”

In reconstructing the events of June, 1989 Lim interviews people from all walks of life: soldier, student, survivor, patriot, protester, and Party official. Some of them are remarkable figures who still challenge the “national amnesia.” Bao Tong was the highest-ranking Party official to be imprisoned; he was also the first person to be arrested, even before June 3. Bao was assistant to Zhao Ziyang, the Party Secretary who was deposed by Deng Xaopeng when he refused to send troops to invade Tiananmen Square. Now retired, Bao Tong remains unimpressed with the Party’s recent reforms and repression. He tells Lim over coffee at a local McDonalds: “During the time of [China’s first emperor] Qin Shihuang, the country was great and during the time of Genghis Khan, the country was great, but how good was it for the people? The country can be doing well, but the people can be doing badly.”

[…] To move from Louisa Lim’s expansive reportage to Rowena He’s introspective style is to experience a sort of claustrophobia. “This book is primarily an oral history of three exiled student leaders from the 1989 Tiananmen Movement in China,” Rowana He tells us at the outset. But her book is more than that. For there is a fourth major character: the author herself. Though she was too young to participate in the protests, she was traumatized by the killings. She tells us that on the day after the massacre, she went to school wearing a black armband. A kindly teacher persuaded her to remove it before she got into serious trouble. But her anger did not subside. “I felt a strong sense of guilt although I was not responsible for the massacre. Maybe that is what people call ‘survivor’s guilt,’” she writes. “I considered it a sin to enjoy life with the thought that many others were suffering in prison or in exile. I later realized that I was not exceptional among those of the Tiananmen Generation. Ironically, we became the best illustration of the two central themes in Communist education–‘sacrifice’ and ‘idealism’.” She immigrated to Canada in 1998, continued her education in Toronto, and now teaches a popular course on Tiananmen at Harvard. […] [Source]

The singer is launching her own Taylor Swift-branded clothing line next month, on the platforms of local e-commerce giants JD.com and the Alibaba group, with t-shirts, dresses and sweatshirts featuring the politically charged date 1989.

The date – as well as being Swift’s year of birth – refers to her album and live tour of the same name, which she will perform in Shanghai in November.

[…] Swift’s US website features bracelets, bags and hairties emblazoned with “T.S. 1989”. For Chinese consumers, the initials could stand for Taylor Swift or Tiananmen Square. It’s not clear whether these items will be made available for Chinese fans. [Source]

Online references to the 1989 June Fourth crackdown are heavily censored. Web users have adopted ever more arcane and oblique codes to evade detection, and censors have blacklisted a steadily widening circle of terms in response. On this year’s anniversary, Sina Weibo blocked searches for “64” in Chinese, pinyin, English, and Arabic and Roman numerals, as well as allusive mathematical notations (e.g. “63+1” and ““8的平方” (8 squared)). Chinese homophones such as “柳丝” (willow silk) have also been blocked in the past, along with terms such as “today” or “that day,”

When I had first lived in Beijing in 1991, as a student, I’d had urgent, furtive conversations in public parks and deserted streets, where friends confided what they had seen in Tiananmen Square. Over the years these had stopped. Some people who had marched and wept in 1989 now defended the authorities’ actions as necessary. Having witnessed the pain of the post-Tiananmen years, I wanted to discover how memories could be reformatted and how China’s population had become complicit in an act of mass amnesia.

I did a simple experiment to gauge the depth of the forgetting. I took the iconic picture of Tank Man – the young man blocking a column of tanks – to four Beijing campuses. Out of 100 students, only 15 could identify the picture. The others leaned in, eager and wide-eyed, asking: “Is it from South Korea?” and “Is it in Kosovo?” One young woman asked what I was writing about. I answered directly: “About liu si [June fourth].” She looked blank. “What is that?” she asked. “I don’t know what that means.” [Source]

“As soon as Daddy died they kicked me out. That bastard steamed bun!” weeps Li Xiaolin in Rebel Pepper’s cartoon. Li, daughter of former premier Li Peng, has reportedly been transferred from the vice presidency of the China Power Investment Corporation (CPI), where she served for 12 years, to the China Datang Corporation. CPI and State Nuclear Power Technology announced their merger in late May—Caijing reports that Li had hoped to head the resulting State Power Investment Group.

On the wall behind Li Xiaolin is an image of a tank crushing Tiananmen titled “Commemoration of the Suppression of the Rebellion of June Fourth.” “Suppression of the rebellion” (píngpàn 平叛) plays on the annual call by activists to “redress” (píngfǎn 平反) June Fourth. Above that is a framed quotation from a 2009 interview in which Li Xiaolin claimed that “outside of my own ability, my capital is equivalent to zero.” Netizens took Li to task for this statement, since her father is a powerful Party leader and she herself is given to ostentation. A 2009 Tianya BBS post in response to Li’s pronouncement is titled “Outside of My Own Ability, My Capital Is Zero—But We Simply Lack that Zero.”